Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
 
News

Red herrings and flying kites (6 July 1999)

BT is finally speaking with one tongue - and the top tongue at that, namely Sir Peter Bonfield's.

ADSL will be rolled out.

After previous red herrings and flying kites this is excellent news although BT received such a drubbing in the media over the past few weeks - the suggestion that 'BT is delaying ADSL in order to milk existing metered services' had become completely mainstream - it had little choice.

Six million households and businesses, rather than people, by March 2000 is ambitious indeed; the back of our envelope equates this to a quarter of the UK population and also suggests that a complete rollout will take three years. We shall see when BT announces its plans.

Of course, how many people take up ADSL depends on how much it costs and whether it is metered or not; the feedback we have had suggests that data transfer rates are relatively unimportant at the moment but everyone wants to pay a flat rate.

ADSL could be metered by the volume of data transferred, but NTL has stolen a march on BT by making its competing cable modem service entirely unmetered and the expression 'always on' is being used everywhere. And, if BT meter ADSL, OFTEL's proposals for action on local loop unbundling will result in someone offering unmetered ADSL ... or better.

Really, if BT makes the right decisions it could foster enormous takeup of ADSL, far greater than the United States where unmetered local telephony is good enough for many. Metered to unmetered is a huge leap and, with a bit of education to convince people that little penny pieces of Internet access are unacceptable, BT could indeed have a 'world class' service.

[ Home ] [ About ] [ Analysis ] [ Solutions ] [ Mythbusters ] [ Get Involved ]
[ News ] [ Features ] [ Reference ] [ Discussion ] [ Press ] [ Diary ]
[ Members ] [ Contact ] [ Site Map ] [ Search ] [ Links ]

Site design by Richard Sliwa
based on an original concept by Runic Design.
© CUT 1999.